CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

historical context. But this way of looking at the object, for Adorno, necessarily misses
the object because it ignores that which makes the object the particular and unrepeatable
object that it is: namely, the social-historical experience of its emergence, which is
(according to Adorno) the non-conceptual objectivity that strives to find expression in the
specificities of the text.
In fact, the non-conceptual experience that first motivates expression in concepts
is according to Adorno constitutive of the meaning of the concept; in Kantian fashion, he
claims that, divorced from this experience, concepts are empty: “Philosophische
Reflexion versichert sich des Nichtbegrifflichen im Begriff. Sonst wäre dieser, nach
Kants Diktum, leer, am Ende überhaupt nicht mehr der Begriff von etwas und damit
nichtig.” 318 But, where Adorno’s account differs from Kant is in its claim that the
concept (a theory, or the conceptual element in the object) must retain within it “traces”
of the non-conceptual content that first gave rise to it, and which the concept sought to
express.
318 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1970), 23. See English translation by E.B. Ashton in Negative Dialectics (New York and London:
Continuum, 2005), 12: “Philosophical reflection makes sure of the nonconceptual in the concept. It would
be empty otherwise, according to Kant’s dictum; in the end, having ceased to be a concept of anything at
all, it would be nothing.” The idea that concepts first arise as an attempt to ‘say’ the non-conceptual, an
attempt to find a concept that would fit the encounter with an irreducibly particular thing, is clearly
reminiscent of Kant’s account of reflective judgment. Jay Bernstein has an excellent discussion of how
Adorno’s theory of concepts can be seen as inspired by, and taking up, Kant’s notion of reflective
judgment. See Bernstein, Jay, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), esp. pp. 308-335. Bernstein interprets Adorno’s account of philosophical reflection as a
“reasoning in transitions,” whose goal is constantly to recreate the experience of reflective judgment: the
experience of encountering an object for which no concept is fully adequate, and of trying to find a new
concept to express the object. While this is certainly an accurate account of Adorno’s idea of the
experience of reflection, which in confronting an object experiences the inadequacy of its pre-existing
concepts and struggles to express the non-conceptual in a new way, I think it is more accurate to see the
method of constellations as a movement in the opposite direction from that of the reflective judgment: not
trying to find new concepts for the experience of the object, but rather trying to break through the concepts
in the object in order to exhibit the experience that first gave rise to those concepts.
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